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professional basketball as consumer product

For the past few weeks now, I’ve been struggling to know what exactly to say about this NBA lockout. Besides the Wolves’ quixotic coaching search, its clearly the league’s most pressing current issue, replacing the things that most of us like to talk about with things that require an economics or business degree to understand. Needless to say, neither of those were really my thing back in school. Instead, I took a lot of philosophy classes and enthusiastically tried to pretend I knew what Heidegger and Foucault were talking about. And although I think this probably made me a better more thoughtful person, it didn’t exactly prepare me to intelligently discuss amortization as it relates to the NBA’s obscure finances. I don’t really even know what that means.

Still, it strikes me that, for a few reasons, this labor conflict is kind of important and bears a little discussion, even from a non-expert like me. So get ready for some thoughts!